I have a lot of concerns over this, and I honestly don't think that Stack Overflow (SO) Inc is aware of what is going to be involved to make this a success, and I don't think the community (that includes curators and mods) have the tools or time to make it a success.
Let's start off with the Lobbies. I'm going to be focus on the SO Lobby throughout this post, but I want to discuss the SE Lobby to start with as well. The two lobbies have worked very differently. The SE lobby, from when I visit, more frequently has a "water cooler" vibe; it has many moderators that are active in the room and an single RO. The SO Lobby is often quite the opposite; it normally has 0-1 active moderators, and 2-3 active ROs at a time. As for the messages, it's not uncommon for it to be utter chaos. Code Dumps, spam, trolling, utter nonsense, non-English content. If you want to see examples, and the regularity, of such content, just check the Lobby Trashcan). I've been in the room for 10 minutes so far today and we've already had 2 of those boxes ticked from 3 different users, and (it's 09:05 UTC on a Thursday). Conversations do happen in the lobby, but it's not a water cooler vibe. To confirm, SE Lobby does get that stuff, but it's not nearly as frequently.
This shows a clear difference in the type of user that the two sites get. It might also be that the other room has more moderators often, and so the type of users that don't want to follow the rules are more quiet.
The problem of behaviour can also be shown in the volume of flags the rooms generate. I just had a look at the last ~100 flags on the SO and SE Chat servers. On SO 98/100 flags (since 2025-11-28) originated from the lobby. The 2 flags that didn't were one of Feeds, where a spam post was displayed in the Meta Room (as it was posted here on Meta), and the other a custom flag to unfreeze a room. So there no flags against user content on SO Chat in those flags.
I'm admittedly, as well, concerned that chat could end up in a position like it was before we had a regular mod (myself) in the lobby, and we see things like this again:
Conversely, on the SE Chat server, 43/99 flags originated from the lobby (since 2025-11-07). This is a considerably striking difference. SO Lobby gets a lot of flagged content, and a lot of it are legitimate flags. Opening the gates for people who we get in the lobby to start doing to same in other rooms, that are currently protected is a real concern. I'm (probably) one of the most active mods in chat, but the Lobby takes up a significant amount of my time; I don't have time to check all the rooms, and understand the history behind the troll users and work out the patterns. I can do that in the Lobby; it's one room. I recognise the repeat users, and so do the ROs; we can't do that when it's all siloed.
Speaking of problem users, to bang the drum again, (lack of) preservation of user information when an account is "re-rolled" is a serious issue. ROs don't have access to this information, but its the sole tool we moderators have to see what a user in Chat has been up to. If a user rerolls all the information goes right now, and we (mods) have no way to trace their prior behaviours. The problem is so bad that it even allows for kick and ban evasion. This wasn't an issue before as rerolling meant you had to get 20 reputation on your new account; that's not the case any more.
Many of the rooms that you are opening the gates for very likely don't want this. The Python Room, is likely a good example of this, however, some rooms also don't seen suitable; the Meta Room and SOCVR are good examples of that. With the gates open, however, as it stands these users likely don't have the powers to deal with them properly.
ROs don't have access to a users annotations; the history of the actions taken against a user's account (though kicks show up in an entirely different place). This means that that can't identify if a user is a repeat problem. It also means that they can't tell if they have been problematic in a different room. Kicks, also, don't escalate (as far as I'm aware). If a user gets kicked from several rooms (in a shortish?) amount of time, I don't believe this raises an auto-flag; we do get this when a single room has 3, 5, 7, etc kicks within 24 hours (unsurprising, these are common against the SO Lobby, but are not included in my prior flag analysis).
Something that's been discussed (not here) is the importance of the rooms having guidelines set up, so that users can follow them. I'm be blunt: this is naive at best... Users don't (can't?) read. The boxes of text with the room guidelines, which have a tick box next to then, might as well state "I didn't read any of this text." The first Guideline for the lobby states "This is an English-only chat room of people"*, yet the volume of non-English content and LLM prompts we get are far from low. Sure, this empowers the ROs to kick/ban the user(s), however, is that really the goal SO Inc want? Kicking users? Isn't that going to promote that "toxic" reputation SO has because it values quality over quantity?
The date that this is happening in January (which the mods were advised), is missing here. I don't know if that means it's been changed (based on feedback), but I still think that this going live anytime sooner than the end of January is too soon. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that the mods and ROs are prepared, both from a toolset and a mindset. Some rooms will need to prepare additional ROs, or at least know work out who they might want to when poop hits the fan. With the Christmas holidays, there's at least 1.5 weeks of dev time lost, so I wouldn't be surprised if between Friday and W/C 05 Jan 2026 no work occurs.
Mobile chat is also not an ideal place to curate/moderate. At present you only have the option to delete, kick, and flag. There's no move option and deletion is one message at a time. When you want to look at user details you end up in the desktop view on a mobile screen (it's not responsive like the main site), which isn't ideal. As a moderator, finding flagged content in the mobile pages is impossible; the rooms show that have x flags, but there's no UI within the room to find them. I, normally, have to open a room and then open a user profile or the rooms info (which takes you to desktop view), go to the mod tools, then the current flags page, and handle them from there. On Desktop I can do this all from the comfort of the room.
I suspect that many users on SO are using desktop, however, on SE that is very likely to be different; mobile chat curation/moderation must be improved. In truth, mobile chat requires parity of functionality of desktop.
I also want to look at this claim:
As it stands, currently 60% of all Lobby room participants have fewer than 20 reputation points
How many of these user actually contribute to chat? How many send nothing more than a "hi" message into chat and never return, or code a large amount of (unformatted) code and don't respond when they are told that's not how chat works, or post non-English content and when that's removed don't say anything further?
Honestly, I likely have far more on this to say, but I should submit this post at some point (I've been writing for an hour now). I'll loop around when I have more stuff to add.